Bustillos sees institutions like San Jose State experimenting with credit for online courses from startups like Udacity, and asks: "are we willing to jeopardize the education of young people (at the cost of millions or billions in public funds) on a bet like that?”

To which my reply is: "Depends. How well do you think things are going now?"

Bustillos' answers seem to be that in the world of higher education, things are going fine, mostly, and that the parts that aren’t going fine can largely be fixed with tax dollars. (Because if there’s one group you'd pin your hopes for an American renaissance on, it would be state legislators.) I have a different answer: School is broken and everyone knows it.

MOOCs are a lightning strike on a
rotten tree. Most stories have focused
on the lightning, on MOOCs as the
flashy new thing. I want to talk about
the tree.

This was interesting:

This vitiation of the diploma is
Goodhart’s Law in action, where a
socially useful metric becomes
increasingly worthless, because the
incentives pushing towards
adulteration are larger than those
pushing towards purity. This is not
some bad thing that was done to us in
the academy. We did this to ourselves,
under the rubric of ordinary
accreditation, at nonprofits and state
schools. Yet I've never once heard the
professors fulminating about MOOCs
also suggest shutting down Excelsior
College. In the academy, we are
terrible at combating threats from the
current educational system, but we are
terrific at combating threats to it.

And a pithy but on-point observation:

In the academy, we're fine with
anything that lowers the cost of
education. We love those kinds of
changes. But when someone threatens to
lower the price, well, then we start
behaving like Teamsters in tweed.